Here's PaleFire's review, for anyone who can't access Amazon:
This memoir provides unstinting detail of the writer’s privilege from the outset. As early as page four, the writer speaks of his 50th birthday present – “a summer house… and it is lovely, very Homes and Gardens, piled high with cushions and pillows, fitted with a sound system and a wood burner”. These details of ease and pleasure abound, and may be more than a little jarring for readers expecting instead to encounter details of how to survive a great loss. The book, in fact, reeks of privilege. Very soon after, on page ten, we are told that “David hates the winter and it [the annual cruise] gets us to the Caribbean, where we have a week on a beach, while England is at its grimmest. We have ten days on board first which David adores.”
The Reverend is most at home writing about earthly pleasures – of which there are many – especially to the detriment of writing about his own (or his partner’s) spiritual wellbeing, and it was this that most disappointed me about the memoir.
Further examples come thick and fast – on page 16, we have David’s “wildly extravagant purchasing in souks”. On page 25 we hear of the cars, “I have one but David had three: his own car, a Land Rover, and a vintage Morris Minor”. It often seemed that Mr Cole was keen to pass off the self-indulgent elements of the couple’s lifestyle as belonging more to David than to himself. Easy to do when David has no editorial input or right of reply. Hence, we learn there is no Lynx Africa for David, whose scent is, of course, Jo Malone. It is David who “would spend a fortune on Welsh blankets” in Hay-on-Wye. There’s more spending, as the five dogs each have a Christmas stocking filled no doubt with tasteful, expensive treats. The dogs get a lot of attention, and one of them is “the gift of an eccentric millionaire… we were living in Knightsbridge at the time” (when not living in Islington, p131), and “his PA phoned to tell us that a car would pick up David”. The couple visit a Bellini opera at Covent Garden, albeit as “guests of a generous friend with a box”. On and on and on it goes, until it becomes a grotesque parody of monied metropolitan life. Occasionally the metropolitan stuff is tempered with references to the hunting-shooting-fishing country set, “Piers and Paula were the only people I had every met who played polo”.
The absurd self-satisfaction, the smugness and the narrowness of the social circle made this a challenging read.
For example, Mr Coles seems pleased with himself for visiting a retail park where he “went to buy gifts, lavish gifts… for the nurses in ICU”. I chuckled when these most “lavish” of gifts turned out not to be John Lewis giftcards, but tubes of handcream. So, a privileged wealthy white man buys hard-working (presumably) poorer women “luxury hand cream due to the chapping nature of their calling”.
It's details like this that creep through that are most revealing. The Reverend does not pop to his nearest offy, but (on p.104), “Stopped at Waitrose and bought expensive wine”. Along with wine, there is more of gravy than the grave about this memoir, and we are treated to details of the ups and downs of the Reverend’s appetite. The Full English Breakfast, on leaving hospital, post mortem, has “meaty sausages, crispy bacon and fried bread”. Mr Coles reveals he “had a running battle [with David] about the place of lardons in an Italian ragu”. His “Indian takeaways for supper” are “an unfailingly effective treat”, and so on.
For anyone expective a more soulful, sorrowful, expansive reaction to bereavement, in the manner of CS Lewis’ A Grief Observed, or Justine Picardy’s If the Spirit Moves You, I can’t emphasise enough how much this book will disappoint.
As other reviews here mention, there are frequent references to the great and the good – to ‘doing’ the funeral for fashion designer Alexander McQueen; Christmas with Earl Spencer, and when “dining with friends” it turns out that Jamie Cullum was among the company. Name dropping though, for me, was far from the most irksome thing about the memoir. It’s passages like this:
“It is hard to think of anything more English than standing in Waitrose in Eastbourne, the object of distanced sympathy, by people buying forced rhubarb and salsify”.
I have lived in England for the 51 years of my life, and this is not my experience or understanding of England. My flavour of England is food banks and wet precincts, but I suppose this is how privilege works: the Reverend has drifted so far from the ordinary mass of people, he no longer has any grip of how ridiculous his book comes across to the vast ranks of people beyond his elite social sphere.
Finally, to the work of comedian Stuart Lee, always supremely aware, endlessly creative and brilliantly incisive. The Top Gear sketch is now famous, and contains these lines,
“He [Richard Hammond] had that crash and then he wrote a book about it, On the Edge, and it sold millions. And I just think there’s something a little bit undignified about all these celebrities writing these cash-in books about some dreadful thing that happens to them…. To the point where I wouldn’t be surprised if, when he was hanging upside down waiting to be rescued, he wasn’t thinking to himself, ‘Oooh, I hope I’m quite badly injured in this! Then I can do a book about it. It’ll sell loads!”
If and when the Reverend revisits this sketch, I hope he cringes. I noted the RRP of the book was £16.99 but there was no charitable element – no banner on the cover saying, for each book sold, £1 will go to Cruse, the bereavement charity’. Clearly, this was a cash-in book written by a minor celebrity, of the kind identified by Stuart Lee. It would never have been considered for publication had it been written by an ordinary civilian. The reasons are obvious: it’s not that good and has little of substance to say about recovering from bereavement.
To pen a book for profit, while name dropping continuously, and pushing acquisitive characteristics onto the departed, all in the name of grief, meant that, for me, this was a most unseemly, difficult read.